Reliability of gravure offset printing under various printing conditions

This paper focuses on the reliability of gravure offset printing and presents a mechanism on how the width of the printed line increases on repeated printings. Of the various printing process parameters, such as the resting times between doctoring, off, and set, printing velocity, printing pressure, and so forth, we investigated the effects of printing velocity, printing pressure, and blanket's thickness on the reliability of gravure offset printing. As the printing velocity increases, the reliability of gravure offset printing also increases. This is because the actual contact time between ink and blanket decreases, resulting in less solvent absorption into the blanket. Printing pressure does not have much influence on reliability. Even though some change was observed, it was within the range of experimental error. Under sufficient printing pressure, this observation implies that the more important factor as regards the absorption model is time rather than pressure. As the thickness of the blanket increases, the reliability also increases. In the case of a thin blanket, in particular, the reliability of gravure offset printing is sensitive to changes in thickness. (C) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3510466]